James F. Crow

Who was James F. Crow?

James Franklin Crow was Professor Emeritus of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a prominent population geneticist whose career spanned from the modern synthesis to the genomic era.

Some of his most significant peer-reviewed contributions were coauthored with Motoo Kimura, including those leading to the neutral theory of molecular evolution. He also wrote an influential introductory textbook on genetics and a more advanced one with Kimura. The list of his graduate and undergraduate students and postdocs includes Alexey Kondrashov, James Bull, Joe Felsenstein, Russell Lande, Dan Hartl, Takeo Maruyama, Terumi Mukai, Wen-Hsiung Li, Chung-I Wu, Charles Langley, and many others.

He was a president of both the Genetics Society of America and the American Society of Human Genetics. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, The American Philosophical Society, the World Academy of Art and Science, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Foreign Member of the Royal Society.